The Bill Has Come Due

 

Boris Johnson has resigned. Jonathan Freedland writes that there is a symmetry to his rise and fall:

Lies and a brazen contempt for the rules powered his rise; lies and a brazen contempt for the rules brought his fall. Which means the political odyssey of Boris Johnson has a curious symmetry. Except that what began as defects in the personality of one man ended as defects in his party and his government, inflicting great damage on the entire country.

The lies that proved his undoing are now all too familiar. The last, fatal lie was his claim that he had not been told directly of complaints of sexual misconduct committed by the former deputy chief whip Chris Pincher, a claim rapidly exposed as false in a rare intervention from a former permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, Simon McDonald. It turned out that Johnson had indeed been briefed about Pincher, and that once again Johnson had not told the truth.

There comes a time, though, when the weight of the lies is just too much to bear:

It was the pattern of repeated mendacity that proved too much to bear both for Johnson’s previous chancellor and his hastily installed successor, his health secretary and a slew of more junior colleagues, a pattern so firmly established in the public mind that even his closest lieutenants could deny it no longer. Central to it, of course, is the scandal known as Partygate.

Johnson had stood before the country in one of the darkest hours of the postwar era and promised that we were all in this together, that the lockdown regulations that kept loved ones from each other, even as they drew their last breath, applied to everyone including him.

But, as the nation discovered nearly two years later, that was not true. He broke those rules, indeed he broke the law and “presided over a culture of casual law-breaking”, in the words of an earlier resigner, the former minister and one-time ally Jesse Norman, even in the very building where those laws were drawn up, seeing himself as “free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else”, to quote the Eton housemaster who had spotted that same trait in Johnson 40 years earlier. He lied again when he told parliament he was shocked and “sickened” to discover parties had taken place in Downing Street, when he knew all too well they had taken place because he attended those parties himself.

None of this was a surprise, because dishonesty has been the one constant through Johnson’s career. Famously, he was sacked from his first job, at the Times, for making up a quote, and later he was sacked from Michael Howard’s frontbench for lying to the then party leader about an affair.

Ordinarily, a reputation for serial deceit would close off the route to the top, or at least prove an impediment. Yet for Johnson it proved no obstacle at all. On the contrary, his route to No 10 was smoothed with lies. How come? What were the forces that propelled a man whose flaws were so clear and well documented into the most powerful job in the land?

The British Conservative Party bought into the lies:

Bored with a leader who was dutiful, diligent and deathly dull – whose wickedest youthful transgression had been running unauthorised through a field of wheat – Conservatives were ready for someone with some swash to his buckle.

That was bound to be Johnson. For more than two decades, ever since he had stolen the show on Have I Got News for You, Johnson had been the Tories’ guilty pleasure. They would mob him at party conference, giggling at his every scripted gag, delighting in every studied ruffling of the hair.

For years, the conventional wisdom had held that “Boris” was the obvious choice for jester but an improbable king. But after May, under whom the Tories won just 9% of the vote in the 2019 elections for the European parliament, they were ready to overlook all the obvious flaws and offer the throne to her polar opposite.

The political logic was straightforward. For all his defects, Johnson was hailed as the Heineken candidate, able to woo parts of the electorate other Conservatives could not reach. Had he not proved that in London, becoming mayor – twice – of an otherwise Labour city? Conservative MPs, even those who knew Johnson best and therefore disliked him most, elected him leader on that basis.

But political success comes with a price. And now the bill has come due.

Image: Al Jezarra

BoJo's Troubles

Boris Johnson is in trouble. Andrew Mackasill and Guy Faulconbridge report that:

Johnson has repeatedly apologized for the parties and said that he was unaware of many of them. However, he attended what he said he thought was a work event on May 20, 2020 which revellers had been told to “bring their own booze”.

To trigger a leadership challenge, 54 of the 360 Conservative MPs in parliament must write letters of no confidence to the chairman of the party’s 1922 Committee. Eleven lawmakers of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party have have submitted letters of no confidence in him on Wednesday morning, the Telegraph reported.

As many as 20 Conservative lawmakers who won their seats at the last national election in 2019 plan to submit letters of no confidence in Johnson, the Telegraph reported. A handful of others have already said they had written such letters.

“Group of 2019 MPs to submit letters to try to hit threshold of 54 to trigger a contest,” BBC Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg said on Twitter. “They might hit 54.”

Johnson has always been an embarrassment. But, these days, it's one misstep after another:

Johnson on Tuesday denied an accusation by his former adviser that he had lied to parliament about a lockdown party, saying nobody had warned him the “bring your own booze” gathering might contravene COVID-19 rules.

He sidestepped questions about whether he would resign if proven he misled parliament, saying only that he wanted to wait for the outcome of an internal inquiry.

Opposition leaders have accused Johnson of being a serial liar and called on him to step down.

Downing Street lockdown parties – some held when ordinary people could not bid farewell in person to dying relatives – have undermined Johnson’s authority.

His own former spokeswoman resigned after she was captured laughing and joking on camera about how to cast a party if asked about it by reporters.

Such was the revelry in Downing Street at one event that staff went to a nearby supermarket to buy a suitcase of alcohol, spilled wine on carpets, and broke a swing used by the prime minister’s young son.

The Mirror said staff had even bought a wine fridge for Friday gatherings, events that were regularly observed by Johnson as he walked to his apartment in the building. 

It won't be long before the press will be referring to Boris as "Nero."

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They've Multiplied

It's official. Boris Johnson is now the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. And a lot of Britons know who they're getting. Jonathan Manthorpe writes:

Everyone knows — even those who have had no direct experience of him — that the real Johnson is a good deal less attractive than the bumbling, politically incorrect, but ebullient and encouraging image he presents.

Johnson’s entire personal and political history as a journalist, MP, mayor of London, and foreign minister is of total self-obsession, crude ambition, deceit and betrayal. He is one of those people who has mastered the art of failing upwards.

 He arrives without being elected to the position:

He got just over 66 per cent of votes from the nearly 90 per cent of the eligible 160,000 Conservative Party members.

Thus just 92,000 people from among the United Kingdom’s 65 million people have made Johnson prime minister.

So Johnson comes to the leadership with almost no national political legitimacy. Therefore, it is likely that he will either choose or be forced to call a general election ahead of the UK leaving the EU.

Besides  Brexit, Johnson has a nasty situation brewing with Iran.

The fools have gone forth and multiplied and democracy is failing.

Image: AP News

Enter Boris

Boris Johnson is about to enter 10 Downing Street. After he takes up residence there, the adventure will begin. Andrew Rawnsley writes:

He will have to learn how to be prime minister. The schoolboy who wanted to be “world king” has spent many years lusting after the job, but that is entirely different to doing it. Many previous tenants of Number 10 will testify that no other role is an adequate preparation for the demands of the premiership. Tony Blair, a highly accomplished leader of the opposition before he moved into Downing Street, once told me that he didn’t really get the hang of it until he had been doing it for four years and he had the shock absorber of a landslide majority while he was learning on the job. Gordon Brown arrived with a decade as chancellor under his belt, but floundered desperately as prime minister. Boris Johnson has never been in charge of a public service department and was an embarrassment in the one cabinet position that he has held.

The civil service is not waiting eagerly for Johnson's arrival:

The civil service is paid to help and will usually look forward to an exhausted premiership being replaced by a fresh one. Contrary to some popular tropes, civil servants respond well to purposeful political leadership. In this case, though, Whitehall is preparing for the Johnson premiership by adopting the brace position. Is this because he is infamously cavalier about detail, bored by complexity, known to react peevishly and sometimes with a ferocious temper when frustrated or contradicted, and has a notoriously casual relationship with the truth? All that and more. The core fear about a Johnson premiership is that officials will not feel confident that they can speak truth to power.

The members of the European Union will try to be diplomatic -- but they fear the worst:

They want an orderly resolution to Brexit, but there is no reservoir of trust for a man who rose to journalistic fame by confecting fabrications that toxified British attitudes towards the EU and who then fronted the mendacities of the Leave campaign. The chances of striking a bargain have been made slighter by the way in which he has campaigned for the leadership. He might have used his dominant position in the contest to introduce some realism into Tory minds about what can be achieved and give himself some scope for manoeuvre. He has instead upped the ante on himself by declaring that Britain will be out on 31 October, “come what may”, “do or die”, deal or no deal. In the closing stages of the campaign, he made reaching an agreement even harder by saying that he wants the Irish backstop ripped out of the agreement altogether.

Sometimes you can see a trainwreck coming. And you can do nothing to stop it.

Image: Sydney Morning Herald

The Coming Of Bo Jo

Tony Burman writes that it is now virtually certain that British Conservatives will choose Boris Johnson as their country's Prime Minister. Think of that for a moment. The next British prime minister will be "Bo Jo the Clown:"

Yes, during this next stage of Britain’s painful slow-motion national suicide, we can at least be consoled that the country’s blond-haired class clown will leave ’em laughing as Britain fades resolutely into obscurity.

How about the time at the London Olympics when, as the city’s mayor, he ended up dangling on a zipwire waving two plastic flags in a silly helmet, pleading “Can you get me a rope?” Or when he tried to convince the Chinese at the Beijing Olympics that the British invented ping pong “on the dining tables of England in the 19th century and called it ‘wiff waff’ ”?

If there ever was a man who says the wrong thing at the wrong time, it's Boris Johnson:

Last year, Johnson described Muslim women who wore burqas and niqabs as “looking like letter boxes (and) bank robbers.” He once wrote that the Queen loves the Commonwealth because “it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-wearing picaninnies.” And, as foreign secretary, he wrote an insulting poem about the president of Turkey suggesting he had sex with a goat.

Why has Britain been given such a "gift?" Consider the party which he will lead:

For a large, diverse country such as the U.K., the Conservatives have come up with a narrow process to choose a new prime minister. Eligible voters will only include the 160,000 grassroots members of their party — in a country of 67 million people.

Even worse is the demographic breakdown of those people. They are largely older voters (56 per cent over the age of 55), overwhelmingly white (97 per cent), mainly male (70 per cent), very well-off and far more right-wing than the country at large.

Another Donald Trump will tread upon the world stage. Shakespeare was right. Oh, what fools these mortals be.

Image: Daily Mail